A Game of Telephone

Looking towards Colorado's Gore Range in the July sunshine

“Telephone”. Perhaps kids still play that simplest communication game. Sit in a line or a circle, one person whispers a phrase to the one seated next to them, something simple. Each passes it in succession until the last person has heard ‘it’ and then says ‘it’ out loud to the whole group. What began as “I took the dog for a walk in the morning,” becomes “I voted for Harry Truman” or “My cousin made the best matzo ball soup” or something to that effect. Always entertaining and frequently hilarious. This simplest of games and the lessons it provides have been on my mind quite a lot lately.

Years ago, realizing that watching or even listening to the news would raise my blood pressure, I decided to only read and not watch or listen to the news. I am deliberate and careful about the publications I read and they include a variety of newspapers, making sure to read both right- and politically left-leaning sources. I am careful to read news and not commentary until, that is, I make the overt decision to move from news to commentary.

Telephone the game has been on my mind lately because I have developed a habit while reading the news: when I am reading a story that begins with “as reported in such-and-such” or “according to some-other-news-source”, I stop and find that original piece of reporting. This means that I read news that is actually prepared by the people who did the reporting and it strips out an awful lot of flotsam and jetsam, providing me with a clear understanding of what actually has happened in the world. For clarity, I do not consider stories about social media posting or reactions to social media posting to be newsworthy or worthy of any of my time whatsoever.

My point here is not that I am so wonderful. I am open to the possibility that this selectivity of mine may indicate that I am prematurely a grumpy old man and that I have an old-fashioned idea of how to learn about and be aware of the world. I am 100% OK with both of those ideas and I may even embrace them. More importantly, this process of carefully selecting the information I read does leave me feeling a bit as though I am watching the rest of the world play Telephone.

My zealotry for original reporting goes beyond the news and extends to original source material. Get ready, here’s where I get really smug. Tell me what you think the original intent of one of our nation’s foundational documents was and I will make sure you’ve read what our founders actually wrote. In recent weeks I have re-read what Madison thought about the separation of church and state when he wrote the text of the Constitution; I have re-read Federalist 26 about the Second Amendment; and have gone back to one of my all-time faves: George Washington’s wonderful and inspirational letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island (then and now housed in Newport’s Tauro Synagogue – a true gem of a landmark that definitely is worth a trip). Just to balance this all out, I also re-read Benjamin Franklin’s 1781 essay on the benefits of farting because, well, it’s Franklin and reading it may have burnished my grumpy old man credentials.

Regrettably, far too many Americans ascribe fanciful beliefs to the founders of our nation that bear no relation to what those scholarly visionaries actually said, wrote, or believed. The game of Telephone those citizens play when they hear something convenient to their own condition and palatable for their own perspective simply takes the place of actual learning. My own smugness notwithstanding, this gives me serious agita. It’s not clear whether the problem is societal myopia, a congenital lack of intellectual curiosity, poor educational standards, or simply the laziness of people who prefer to be led by the loudest or most aggressive voices in the room. I suspect that it would fall on deaf ears to explain to many of my fellow Americans that the principles on which our system of government was founded drew heavily from the writings of leading 17^th and 18^th century radical French and English political philosophers in addition to the works of the great Greek authors delineating the principles first attributable to Athenian democracy. To be clear, I do not expect to hear anyone running for office in 2024 to be quoting Montesquieu, Locke or Plato. It’s a shame. Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, and so many of the others camped out in Independence Hall in 1787 knew and explicitly considered the work of those authors. Our Constitution simply was the first great expression of those radical ideas synthesized together and put into practice – hence the expression the “American Experiment”.

Enough already, I’ll rein it back and get to the point. There is nothing wrong with a person taking a position – political or otherwise – because it is in their best interest, whether that interest is economic, religious, social, or psychological. Just admit it when you do. Please. It is unflattering and unproductive for anyone to take a position and then make up some fictional rationale that sounds like it might be based on facts that may have been communicated by someone in the media who heard it from someone else in our public life who may seem authoritative because of their apparent confidence in the espoused non-fact. That’s a game of Telephone and there is a reason children play that game as a lesson in ineffective communication.

Read. Ask clarifying and challenging questions and seek out the answers. Be curious, very curious. Read some more. Go to the sources for a more complete understanding. And when the person before you whispers in your ear, repeat it back to them and ask yet more questions so that you’re not the one being told “walk the dog” and hearing “Harry Truman” or “matzo ball soup”. Then, as we all should, go for a walk and contemplate. And maybe, just maybe, our world will become a better place for all of us.

When not writing satire about flatulence, Franklin said: “Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.” (Poor Richard Improved, Philadelphia 1755). Speaking of contemplation, please pardon me as I head outside and into the mountain air for the remainder of the afternoon.